sMite stands for ‘simple Mite’, which to most people still means nothing at all. Mite is a time tracking web service, and depending on how companies make use of it things can become more complicated than they should be.
smite is how I tried to tackle this complexity in less than 8 hours!
addshore
Refactoring around WatchedItem in MediaWiki
The refactoring started as part of [RFC] Expiring watch list entries. After an initial draft patch was made touching all of the necessary areas it was decided refactoring first would be a good idea as the change initially spanned many files. It is always good to do things properly ® instead of pushing forward in a hacky way increasing technical debt.
The idea of a WatchedItemStore was created that would remove lots of logic from the WatchedItem class as well as other watchlist database related code that was dotted around the code base such as in API modules and special pages.
The main patches can be seen here.
T460 & Windows 10
A few weeks ago I was blessed with a new Lenovo ThinkPad T460 to replace my old and very beaten up HP Pavilion DV6-3180EA. This also meant an upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 that I have been putting off for some time. Here are my first impressions of both the T460 and Windows 10.
Language usage on Wikidata
Wikidata is a multilingual project, but due to the size of the project it is hard to get a view on the usage of languages.
For some time now the Wikidata dashboards have existed on the Wikimedia grafana install. These dashboards contain data about the language content of the data model by looking at terms (labels, descriptions and aliases) as well as data about the language distribution of the active community.
For reference the dashboard used are:
- https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/wikidata-datamodel-terms
- https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/wikidata-site-stats
All data below was retrieved on 1 February 2016
The break in Wikidata edits on 28 Jan 2016
On the 28th of January 2016 all Wikimedia MediaWiki APIs had 2 short outages. The outage is documented on Wikitech here. The outage didn’t have much of an impact on most projects hosted by Wikimedia. However due to most Wikidata editing happening through the API, even when using the UI, the project basically stopped for roughly … Read more
My Joomla Component development workflow
My first and currently only Joomla component development was for the SWA UK website. The component manages memberships, events, tickets, results and more and is a rewrite of a previous component for Joomla 1.
But in this post lets ignore what the component does and instead concentrate the development workflow that is used. After lots of research at the beginning of development I decided to ignore other methods of developing a component and this is what I ended up coming up with.
Building applications around Wikidata (a beer example)
Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be rather easy.
Mediawiki Developer Summit 2016
The Wikimedia Developer Summit is an event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2016. Last year the event was called the MediaWiki Developer Summit.
As with last year the event took place in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California. The event was slightly earlier this year, positioned at the beginning of January instead of the end. The event format changed slightly compared with the previous year and also included a 3rd day of general discussion and hacking in the WMF offices. Many thanks to everyone that helped to organise the event!
I have an extremely long list of things todo that spawned from discussions at the summit, but as a summary of what happened below are some of the more notable scheduled discussion moments:
WMDE: Engineering Analytics Activities
This is an internal WMDE presentation given at the start of “metric driven development” for the WMDE & Wikidata dev teams. The presentation is pretty bare bones but it provides a general overview of the plan and links to the current state of things. The main area of interest from the presentation is the … Read more
Wikidata references from Microdata
Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!